Global Ecommerce Best Practices To Test On Every Page In Your Online Store

When a new visitor lands on your website you have a finite amount of time to convince them to stick around.

There are a number of factors to consider when trying to reduce your bounce rate, let’s explore some ecommerce best practices that you should test on every page in your shop (this means these elements probably belong in the header or footer).

Historically an ecommerce stores global navigation appears on every page of the website.

This serves two core purposes:

It communicates to the user where they are and allows them to switch between top level categories quickly.

It gives people who don’t land on the homepage (when categories are named well) a descriptive overview of what else is available in the store.

Ok so you can argue that Amazon got rid of their product categories as persistent global navigation. But just because it worked for them doesn’t mean it will work for you.

Unless your visitors are consistently logged in or frequent users or if they rely predominantly on search to navigate, please do not kill your global navigation in exchange for a mobile menu burger or hidden menu!

Avoid making your users journey through your sales funnel harder where possible. Show your main categories clearly in a persistent global navigation with sub categories in a megamenu drop down (for desktop) like this.

And if you do change your global navigation to something like this burger below, even on desktop.

Make sure to collect user testing and usability data and understand how the change affects your users and conversion rates.

Rounding Up: Global Ecommerce Best Practices To A/B Test

Ecommerce best practices to test on your homepage

Optimizing your value proposition helps focus your business and marketing efforts in one direction or on one core pain point within your market.

It stops you from wasting time trying to acquire the wrong customers with the wrong marketing message. Demonstrating to your prospects you understand their needs and what they value in a product or service.

It also helps you align your product with your prospects goals, clearly and concisely communicating to them the outcome of spending money with you.

When it comes to ecommerce homepage designs, it oftens pays to keep things simple. Don’t forget, this is the first step in your funnel, and we want visitors moving down it consistently.

In this case study, the Weather Channel wanted to turn more of their visitors into premium subscribers.

They simplified their homepage and focused (like we just said) on one main call to action.

These changes increased conversions 225%.

Show your products on the homepage

In Keith Hagen’s top ecommerce website comparative analysis, he found 13/13 of his best in class ecommerce websites (for CRO purposes) showed merchandise on the homepage.

He said:

“From this we can see the sites we consider (and track) best-in-class pretty much all offer direct access to specific products from their home pages. Often eCommerce sites leave out direct access to products citing that they sell too many to call out just a few. However in the case of these best-in-class sites, we see homepage ares like “Most Popular” or seasonal highlighted products.”

According to akamai.com and gomez.com, a one-second delay in page response can result in a seven percent reduction in conversions. So for an eCommerce site that makes $1,000 a day, the same delay could end up costing them $25,000 in lost sales every year.

Make sure to show the price on the product archive

When people are comparison shopping, a common step in a visitors buying process, they are trying to decide if a product is right for them.

The defining factors that ultimately affect this outcome are:

Price

Product Presentation (Images, video)

Copywriting

You must show the price, do not hide it on the archive. And make sure you consider your product naming and description carefully. Great descriptions can improve product archive to single product page click through rates.

Use personalized banner ads to increase conversions

59% of online shoppers believe that it is easier to find more interesting products on personalized online retail stores. And 56% of online shoppers are more likely to return to sites that use personalization.

They served visitors personalized banner ads on their category pages, depending on what the user searched for.

“Now, if a person is searching for bedding, we can do a targeted banner for the bedding category,” marketer Reichman says. “The offer can appear in the bedding category on our site and can say anything from ‘Shop our Luxury Bedding and Save 10 Percent,’ to ‘Free Shipping on All Bedding Orders Over $75.'”

Rounding Up: Ecommerce best practices to test on your product archive

Ecommerce best practices to test on your product pages

Now we’ve optimized your shop, homepage and product archive, let’s look at some case studies on how the best eccomerce sites improve their single product pages.

Don’t guess what product features are important to your customers

ExpressWatches wanted to test if their customers cared more about a price guarantee or a trust symbol.

So they tested it 😉

Original:

Variation:

The replacement of the price guarantee with a trust symbol increased sales by 107%. The lesson here is, don’t presume to know what your customers care about.

For example on this VW car designer app, users were confused which wheel was selected and currently being shown on the car, because the selected wheel was ‘greyed out’; which is normally a convention meaning ‘unavailable’.

With this in mind make sure visitors on your ecommerce store know their commands have been interpreted.

The most important commands in terms of conversions are form completions. Such as ‘Add to cart’, ‘Checkout’, ‘Sign Up’.

You wouldn’t leave out a ‘Signed Up!’ page or ‘Purchase Complete!’ confirmation, so don’t leave out ‘Added to your cart’.

You can also show the cart has items and show how many.

GerrettLeight.com does a great job of this with a very obvious mini cart pop out, showing the product and offering a checkout option.

Make more expensive product descriptions longer

When someone is paying a lot for something, especially if the brand is not very established, you need to give them all the details. The specs, the reviews, the full description. More information and more reservations and FAQ’s answered.

If you are selling wearable items, show a size chart in a pop up

It’s a great idea to have a size chart for your products, whether rings or sweaters. All wearable things have at least some size ranges.

Make it easy for visitors to learn which size is best for them.

Don’t however, show the size chart inline. This will distract most visitors (who may already know their size for common goods) and could reduce conversions.

Instead hide the size chart in a modal window or slide down panel in mobile.

Avoid negative social proof

Taloon a/b tested removing their social sharing buttons from their product pages.

Original:

Variation:

The variation saw an 11.9% increase in CTA clickthroughs as compared to the original.

This was hypothesized as due to negative social proof, most of the pages had zero shares and therefore people thought the products were unpopular.The share buttons are also a distraction for the one main goal or task for the page which is to get the visitor to click ‘Add to cart’.

Rounding Up: Ecommerce best practices to test on your product pages

Ecommerce best practices to test on your checkout or cart page

Finally ley’s look at ecommerce checkout page best practices and case studies you can learn from and A/B test.

In this case study Bionic Gloves, an online store that designs and sells a range of gloves, in a test to improve their cart abandonment removed their ‘special offer’ and ‘gift card’ fields from the cart page.

This is the original design:

This is the variation:

The primary goal that they were tracking was the revenue made. The variation won and increased the total revenue by 24.7%, and revenue per visitor by 17.1%.

David from Sq1 the agency behind the test said:

“By showing the Promo Code field on the cart, users were enticed to leave the site in search of a promo code. At that point, the conversion process is interrupted and you are more likely to lose potential customers. As such, hiding it was a very logical test.”

Use this pros and cons list to decide on a single page checkout

There are enough case studies to sink a battleship arguing over single and multi page checkouts.

The truth is, it’s different for different businesses, and it comes down to the execution.

“Aside from the basic stuff that every cart page should do, I think every ecommerce site cart page should display availability and when it will ship. Adding something like “In Stock, Ships Today” can help boost customer confidence in your brand and give them a sense of urgency. Its important to reassure them that you can fulfill the order quickly. If you’re drop shipping items might take longer, so let your customer know.”

Comments

53 Responses or Pingbacks

Great post Giles,
The main purpose of every business owner is to make a sale so he can take care of his financial needs.

However for you to be able to make that sale whether you’re an ecommerce owner, blogger or any other form of internet marketing, you have to research and see what others are doing in your niche.

If you see everyone doing it then, it simply means that its working therefore, what you should now do is to implement it on your blog too and see if it will also work for you and if it does then, you adapt to it.

I see many ecommerce stores doing majority of the things you mentioned here and it shows that its a very cool strategy.

Hi Theodore
Thanks for your response.
Of course it is important to keep up with best practices, but you must a/b test ideas from case studies.
And even better, come up with new ideas for website changes from data collected from your website and customer.

Hi GoGoChimp
Thanks for the kind words.
I am actually currently working with a client to create a sales funnel for their monthly subscription business.
The results of which I will post as a case study in a month or two, I’ll let you know when it goes live.

Thanks Giles for sharing this wonderful article. Improving checkout process can contribute significantly in reducing shopping crat abandonments on your e- commerce store. But, apart from this, improving the user experience and appeal of your site through the use of various web testing and web analytics tools can also help in improving your conversion rates. There are various tools like Unbounce, Mocking Fish, Crazy Egg, Click Tale and such others that can help you in this direction.

Hey Keith
Thanks for your detailed response, I agree these best practices are only a small part of a much bigger CRO process.
They should also be superseded by hypothesis ideas collected from analysing data from your website and customer of course!

No suggestions on how to get past the round-robin of negative social proof. Don’t display low “like” numbers, but you cannot collect high like numbers unless you display the like box?
This drives me crazy, I’d love more info on how, or rather when, to implement like and share buttons on new sites with initially low traffic.

Hey Dian
You can initially not show the like count, just the social network icon in a custom button using the api or a plugin.
Then once you are up to respectable figures for your niche, show the count.

It was the best article I have read in months. The article is written in a very clear way that any one can follow the steps mentioned above and get the advantage.
I will also apply all the case studies i hv read above on my website step by step and will write down the results i get.
Thanks a lot Giles.
Bookmarking it

Excellent article!
Enjoyed lot while reading some of the best methods to drive more sales on eCommerce website. all the points you mentioned here are very interesting and also helpful too. You can also use social sign-in to get more traffic and sales.

Excellent analysis,
The site goal is to convert the visitors into customers and for this one need to create more persuasive product pages with compelling and clear images. Displaying multiple options like instant search, top sellers, easy add to cart, quick checkout process and many more user-friendly features can be easily added to websites by using plugins.

Such a long post takes more time to read out, but it’s exciting. Sale conversion is a major issue for all e-commerce owner, but your story has dropped down the problem and headache of many e-commerce websites. I just read us the artcile but I need to follow these steps on my site and need to see the result. Numerous measures and many tactics in a single article. Will work out all these in my wesbite and will share my experience soon.

In addition to Keith`s suggestion, one should keep their eyes on pricing strategies of their competitors. I have seen many eCommerce client complaining about bounce rate and lower conversion rate and the best possible solution is keeping your price competitive.

Each and every point is important for me. I recently started our e-commerce site. Presently we are doing SEO off-pageI read you full 51 points that how to start an e-commerce business, each and every point are interesting and also very important for me. Very useful for beginners.